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con-text (kon'tekst) n. 1. the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specified word or passage and can influence its meaning or effect. 2. the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation
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Ok. For the record: The "Ibrahimi Mosque" (i.e., the Tomb of the [Jewish] Patriarchs) and the "Bilal Mosque" (known universally -- until just a few years ago -- as Rachel's Tomb) are and have always been Historic Jewish Sites and have been, with complete justification, so claimed by the Jewish People for the past 2900 years or so (see, Genesis, chapters 23 and 35). This is not new. This is not news.

In 2000, after hundreds of years of recognizing the site as Rachel's
Tomb, Muslims began calling it the "Bilal ibn Rabah mosque."20
Members of the Wakf used the name first in 1996, but it has since
entered the national Palestinian discourse. Bilal ibn Rabah was an
Ethiopian known in Islamic history as a slave who served in the house of
the prophet Muhammad as the first muezzin (the individual who calls the
faithful to prayer five times a day).21 When Muhammad died,
ibn Rabah went to fight the Muslim wars in Syria,
was killed in 642 CE, and buried in either Aleppo or Damascus.22
The Palestinian Authority claimed that according to Islamic tradition,
it was Muslim conquerors who named the mosque erected at Rachel's Tomb
after Bilal ibn Rabah.

The Palestinian claim ignored the fact that Ottoman firmans
(mandates or decrees) gave Jews in the Land of Israel the right of
access to the site at the beginning of the nineteenth century.23
The Palestinian claim even ignored accepted Muslim tradition, which
admires Rachel and recognizes the site as her burial place. According to
tradition, the name "Rachel" comes from the word "wander," because she
died during one of her wanderings and was buried on the Bethlehem road.24
Her name is referred to in the Koran,25 and in other Muslim
sources, Joseph is said to fall upon his mother Rachel's grave and cry
bitterly as the caravan of his captors passes by.26 For
hundreds of years, Muslim holy men (walis) were buried in tombs
whose form was the same as Rachel's.

Then, out of the blue, the connection between Rachel, admired even by
the Muslims, and her tomb is erased and the place becomes "the Bilal ibn
Rabah mosque." Well-known Orientalist Professor Yehoshua Porat has
called the "tradition" the Muslims referred to as "false." He said the
Arabic name of the site was "the Dome of Rachel, a place where the Jews
prayed."27

Only a few years ago, official Palestinian publications contained not a
single reference to such a mosque. The same was true for the Palestinian
Lexicon issued by the Arab League and the PLO in 1984, and for Al-mawsu'ah
al-filastiniyah, the Palestinian encyclopedia published in Italy
after 1996. Palestine, the Holy Land, published by the
Palestinian Council for Development and Rehabilitation, with an
introduction written by Yasser Arafat, simply says that "at the
northwest entrance to the city [Bethlehem] lies the tomb of the
matriarch Rachel, who died while giving life to Benjamin." The West
Bank and Gaza - Palestine also mentions the site as the Tomb of
Rachel and not as the Mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah.28 However,
the Palestinian deputy minister for endowments and religious affairs has
now defined Rachel's Tomb as a Muslim site.29

The footnotes refer to ample annotation in Shragai's study (highly recommended), which exposes systematic Palestinian Authority exploitation and subversion of the Oslo Agreements and their progeny, using Rachel's Tomb as a prime example. In short, the faux outrage and verifiably false claims being made today are contrary not only to the historical record but also to the positions of palestinian Arabs themselves prior to and even after Oslo.

The pattern is clear. It was in the wake of Oslo that the distortion of history to deny Jewish connections to our holiest places began. And with every Israeli overture and instance of American pressure, that process is only accelerated. The implications of these developments for the effectiveness and likely consequences of the "peace process" should not be ignored.

Top
Catholic scholars have written an unusual and impassioned private
letter to Pope Benedict urging him to slow down the sainthood procedure
for wartime Pope Pius XII, accused of turning a blind eye to the
Holocaust.

The letter, which was made available to Reuters
by a source familiar with the initiative, is extremely rare because in
the past it has mostly been Jewish groups and not Catholic academics
who have written to popes about the issue.

MK Danny Danon says anti-Israel groups like New Israel Fund must not be tolerated

A recent report claimed that the well-known NGO the New Israel Fund
and 16 of its grantees provided the bulk of the testimony that resulted
in the anti-Israel Goldstone Report.
In light of these accusations I formally requested a public inquiry
into the funding of this organization. I did so, because I have
sufficient suspicions of the dubious nature of its funders abroad.

This would not be the first time that hostile countries and
groups, which yearn for Israel's destruction, have attempted to meddle
in our internal politics. However this time it's worse than ever
because the report has already done untold damage to Israel's standing
in the international community.

See also this piece last week in Ha'aretz (!), which has a different take on the donor angle, but not on the overall malevolence of the NIF.

Thus in funding organizations that work to deepen the
rift between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the NIF has racked up noteworthy
successes. Astonishingly, however, these successes are not proudly
displayed to the fund's philanthropists. These donors, most of them Jews who support Israel as a Jewish and
democratic state, are asked to contribute to the fund's praiseworthy -
but as it turns out, not primary - activities: improving welfare,
education and human rights in Israel. Many NIF donors do not know that their money is being used to fund
dozens of organizations committed to inflaming the Arab street,
intensifying its nationalist tendencies and deepening the rift between
Jews and Arabs. These philanthropists would almost certainly object to their money
being used to undermine Israel's Jewish identity and to lay a
theoretical, legal and political framework for establishing another
Arab state, on top of the proposed Palestinian state, in place of the
State of Israel.

Tom Friedman is putting his charming combination of ignorance and arrogance on display again this morning.

Avoid the term "global warming." I prefer the term "global
weirding," because that is what actually happens as global temperatures
rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are
expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most
violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like
crazy in Washington -- while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in
Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought -- is right
in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The
weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than
ever; others will become drier than ever.

But beyond that, it's a sign of obvious desperation when the defenders of climate alarmism bring out the big gun: reliance on foreign oil.

Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now. And Iran,
Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other.
Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming
confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move
toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to
oil. Yes, sir, it is morning in Saudi Arabia.

As if confusion about climate change has any rational connection to the inclination to move toward clean-tech and away from oil addition. For the record, I'm all for that move, climate change (whatever Tom Friedman wants to call it) or no climate change.

Perhaps liberals can't manage to generate sufficient enthusiasm for
independence from foreign oil on the basis of very real political, economic
and national security threats. Maybe they can only find the will for
that effort based on exaggerated environmental threats? Sad, if
true, but let them tell themselves whatever they need to hear to get on
board. Just do it.

The problem is that reasonable people also understand economic
trade-offs. Many don't like intrusive legislation. Others can sniff out
fear-mongering for what it is. Some even trust in humanity's ability to
adapt to any changes in climate trends.

In the end, though, the burden of proof is on the believers. And if
they're going to ask a nation -- a world -- to fundamentally alter its
economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers'
credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.

In next week's issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria argues that the war on global jihad is over, and it was won by the overwhelming might of moderate Muslims.

But, in fact, the entire terrain of the war on terror has evolved
dramatically. Put simply, the moderates are fighting back and the tide
is turning. We no longer fear the possibility of a major country
succumbing to jihadist ideology. In most Muslim nations, mainstream
rulers have stabilized their regimes and their societies, and
extremists have been isolated. This has not led to the flowering of
Jeffersonian democracy or liberalism. But modern, somewhat secular
forces are clearly in control and widely supported across the Muslim
world. Polls, elections, and in-depth studies all confirm this trend.

Interesting. In Indonesia, for example,

... JI [Jemaah Islamiah] has been marginalized and main-stream political parties have gained
ground, all while a young democracy has flowered after the collapse of
the Suharto dictatorship.

It's a veritable revolution.

Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest and most prestigious school of
Islamic learning, now routinely condemns jihadism. The Darul Uloom
Deoband movement in India, home to the original radicalism that
influenced Al Qaeda, has inveighed against suicide bombing since 2008.
None of these groups or people have become pro-American or liberal, but
they have become anti-jihadist.

Don't believe it? We have data!

The data on public opinion in the Muslim world are now overwhelming.
London School of Economics professor Fawaz Gerges has analyzed polls
from dozens of Muslim countries over the past few years. He notes that
in a range of places--Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and
Bangladesh--there have been substantial declines in the number of people
who say suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian
targets can be justified to defend Islam. Wide majorities say such
attacks are, at most, rarely acceptable.

Gerges has indeed analyzed polls. You can read his conclusions here, published in May of last year. So it's settled, then. Global jihad is no longer a threat and we have moderate, secular Muslims to thank for that.

This is very far cry indeed from what Fareed Zakaria was arguing, just as strenuously in the same pages, last March. Back then, he was assuring us that only by aligning our interests with non-violent Islamist leaders could we hope to make a dent in what he then saw as the inexorably growingpopularity of Islamist extremism.

It is not just in the Swat valley that Islamists are on the rise. In
Afghanistan the Taliban have been gaining ground for the past two years
as well. In Somalia last week, Al-Shabab, a local group of Islamic
militants, captured yet another town from government forces. Reports
from Nigeria to Bosnia to Indonesia show that Islamic fundamentalists
are finding support within their communities for their agenda, which
usually involves the introduction of some form of Sharia--Islamic
law--reflecting a puritanical interpretation of Islam. No music, no
liquor, no smoking, no female emancipation.

How do we get in two short months from that to Gerges's "overwhelming" data on the rejection of jihad in the Islamic world? Was it the magic of Obama's ascendancy to the White House? Unlikely, especially since most if not all of Gerges's data was collected prior to that historic event. Most telling, in contrast to his essay of next week, is Zakaria's approving citation, last March, of Reuel Marc Gerecht:

What you have to realize is that the objective is to defeat bin Ladenism, and you have to start the evolution. Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s.

(Daniel Pipes has responded to this argument here, among other places.) Well, it appears that an evolution has started in Fareed Zakaria's approach to the war on global jihad, but it's hard to figure. Maybe it was all that overwhelming data that Fawaz Gerges dug up. But then, Gerges was the fellow who just six months before 9/11 was suggesting:

Should not observers and academics keep skeptical about the U.S.
government's assessment of the terrorist threat? To what extent do
terrorist 'experts' indirectly perpetuate this irrational fear of
terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios? Does
the terrorist industry, consciously or unconsciously, exaggerate the
nature and degree of the terrorist threat to American citizens?

I particularly remember Gerges' dismissal of the terrorist threat in early 2001 (I seem to recall a TV interview on PBS) because it was the stimulus for a debate between me and a close friend at the time. Meanwhile, in the most recent volume of the Middle East Quarterly, Michael Rubin and Matthew Levitt make two pretty strong and well-documented cases for the argument that Syria (for example) is becoming an ever more active supporter of that very same global jihad that has supposedly been crushed.

And there's quite a bit of otherdataoutthere suggesting that the global jihad is thriving elsewhere, as well. Unfortunately. Except in the world of Newsweek and Fareed Zakaria, where reality appears to be ... pliable.

In a shot heard round the world last week, Daniel Pipes unequivocally advocated a crippling U.S. strike on Iran's nuclear arsenal, suggesting that it might even "save the Obama Presidency." For the record, he said nothing about either the 2012 or the 2010 elections, and I'd suggest he was speaking more to Obama's legacy than to his chances of a second term.

A few days later, Pat Buchanan (to whom I will not link on this blog ... it's at Townhall and it's not hard to find) wove Pipes's column into an argument for leaving Iran alone. Iran doesn't really want a bomb, sanctions would only piss them off and following Pipes' advice would only guarantee a Democrat sweep of both the Congressional midterms and the next Presidential election. "True" conservatives ... beware!

Yesterday, Sarah Palin appeared on Fox News Sunday and, in one of those rambling, largely incoherent interviews for which she's been justifiably skewered by the left and the MSM, she managed to give the impression of both (a) aligning herself with Buchanan (not a good move) and (b) completely misunderstanding his point. Here's the key snip:

WALLACE: How hard do you think President Obama will
be to defeat in 2012?

PALIN: It depends on a few things. Say he
played - and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day
- say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided
really [to] come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would
like him to do, but - that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going
to happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were
today I do not think Obama would be re-elected. But three years from now, things could change if -- on the national security front . . .

It goes without saying that Buchanan never remotely advocated support for Israel. But when he asks if Obama will "cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make 'conservatives swoon,' in Pipes' phrase, to save himself and his party," he's clearly pleading with his audience (such as it is) to lobby against such a move. Did Sarah get that? Because if she did, why didn't she cite Pipes (who is on her side here) rather than Buchanan (who clearly isn't)?

Meanwhile, those who have been trying to paint Palin as a Buchananite since the 08 election are having a field day. This is the kind of thing that's now got me hoping we'll see and hear less rather than more of Sarah Palin in the months and years ahead.

Update: Nevertheless ... give me a break. How far a cry is writing a few crib notes on your palm from a teleprompter that feeds you a word-for-word script? At least as far as the wild Alaskan tundra is from Washington. Let's not make ridiculous comparisons, shall we? See also, glass houses, stones: when it comes to mindless mediocrity ... Andrea Mitchell has no room to mock.

By most accounts, last night's J-Street (spit) national kick-off event appears to have been largely a bust, attracting little attention beyond its own ardent supporters and most vehement detractors. The live event was here (I used that term loosely) in Philadelphia and was reportedly attended by around two hundred people, few of them students in spite of being held on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Z-Street, a new, grassroots, genuinely pro-Israel organization founded, in part, to counter J-Street's propaganda, sponsored this alternative event, held in the same building at the same time, which attracted a sizable crowd of its own.

In spite of J-Street's dubious pretensions to being "pro-Israel," its rhetoric and the reactions of its acolytes always reveal a very different agenda. Take, for example, the first major applause line of last night's speech by Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami:

Maybe you just believe that all people have a right to
self-determination, to opportunity, to security - and you want to see an
end to the occupation of the Palestinian people.

By contrast, there was nary a clap in response to this one:

We believe in the state of Israel and support the notion of a national home for the Jewish people.

Nor was any enthusiasm generated by this very odd formulation of J-Street's aspirations:

We will build a home together where our organizing and our advocacy
around Israel lines up with the values and the principles of our people.

A community where it is acceptable to study and to learn about
history and about competing narratives and claims to the land - where
we can hug and wrestle with Israel at the very same time.

Hug and wrestle? Is he serious? Or this one

You'll help redefine and expand the very concept of being pro-Israel. No longer will this pro- require an anti-.

Mr. Ben-Ami, judging by this performance, is a pretty terrible public speaker, which I must say is a bit encouraging. But his organization is a nasty, disingenuous scam designed to dress up patently anti-Israel rhetoric in the guise of "progressive" pro-Israel ("pro-peace," pro-democracy") advocacy. It plays on the hopes and fears of the hopelessly naive and uninformed, and hopefully this latest initiative will die on the vine. In short, J-Street is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Powerline debunks some of the BS in Obama's 2011 budget, pointing out that, when you get through the slight-of-hand and misdirection, some of the President's proposals appear likely to throw the recovering economy under the bus.

I'd like to add that if you look even closer (@ page 40), the following is just plain wrong:

Currently, if a middle-class family donates a dollar to its favorite
charity or spends a dollar on mortgage interest, it gets a 15-cent tax
deduction, but a millionaire who does the same enjoys a deduction that is more
than twice as generous.

Actually, if a middle-class family donates a dollar to
its favorite charity or spends a dollar on mortgage interest, and if it itemizes, it gets a one dollar
tax deduction (that would be 100 cents, not 15, Barry). And the millionaire (family ... they do have families, too) actually gets less (we'll get to that in a minute). The millionaire (family) does NOT "enjoy a deduction" that's any more generous than the middle class family. It's just that if the millionaire family's tax rate is twice as high as the middle class family's, the millionaires will probably (depending on a number of other things) get a larger tax reduction (not the same thing as deduction) bang out of their tax deduction buck. The buck, however, is still a buck. Not 15 cents.

You'd think the President could get the most basic
elements of the tax code right in his budget, but that appears to be
beyond his pay grade. It's just semantics, you say? Not exactly. And
how are Americans to be expected to understand this stuff if the
President clearly can't (or can't communicate it clearly)?

And still worse ...The kicker is that the "millionaire" family actually
doesn't get the whole buck, because there are already limits on itemized deductions that kick in way below Obama's "wealthy family" income of $250,000 a year. For 2009 (the year you're getting ready to do your taxes for now), a married couple starts
losing the benefit of their itemized deductions once their adjusted gross income hits $166,800.

So if you're a not-quite-wealthy family with income of $200,000 and itemized deductions for taxes, mortgage interest and charitable gifts of $50,000, you only actually get to deduct 99 cents on the dollar. If you're a filthy rich capitalist pig family with income of $1,600,000 and the same $50,000 in itemized deductions, you only get to deduct 73 cents on the dollar. That's under current law. (You can check for yourself ... Publication 17, pages 207-08.)

What was that again about the millionaire enjoying a deduction that's more than twice as generous?